Word doesn't recognize my citations

Hi

I have been using endnote X4 and word 2010. I have been inserting citations as I go. But now it doesn’t recognise the vast majority of them as citations. The citations in the text i.e. (Alonso 2010) do not act like citations in the text and new citations in the reference menu do not get put in alphabetical order with the others. According to word I have 12 citations when really I should have about 150. I’ve no idea why it is doing this and I really don’t want to have to go all through the text re-inputting the citations.

If anyone can help me I’d be very grateful!

Thanks

Hannah

Did you share the document with anyone else?  Did you open it and save it in another word processor (like Open Office?)  – these would corrupt/erase endnote fields.  

I suggest you go back to a back up version that had the citations - unformat them to temporary citation and unformat those in your current version and compare and combine the two of them.  Then “update citations and bibliography”.  You may also have to turn on CWYW again from the ribbon.

If it is too late for that  – then I would suggest – and the way you do this will depend on the circumstances… 

You could try - on a copy, unformat the recognized citations to temporary citations {Author, YEAR #rec number} and then try doing some search and replace to convert citations to {author, YEAR} and see if you can format them and select the correct citation that should be associated with the citation.  I think you will need the comma before year to get this work, or you will just see the author and no year in your citations.  You can restore the year one by one by rt clicking, selecting edit citation  and selecting default (rather than “exculde year”) but it might be easier to search for <space> 20 and replace with comma<space>20 and the same for 19.  Then search for , and replace with , for the 16 other citations you have. Without seeing the document I can’t predict how many other glitches this approach might cause.  – if there are “et al” names, you will need to search for those and replace with nothing (or a comma).   

Oh  – I forgot that there is a preferences >formating where you can turn off the automatic feature of deleting the year if the year is not in the temporary citation.  – so that should avoid the “exclude year” fix I mentioned.  

Thank you very much for this. yes I think that is exactly what has happened so I will take your approach to sorting it out. Thanks again!